Anti-disturbance Trajectory Tracking Control for a Quadrotor UAV with Input Constraints⋆

Abstract

This paper presents the trajectory tracking control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) with disturbances and input constraints. The UAV's system is decomposed into an outer position loop and an inner attitude loop. The position tracking control is achieved by a class of saturated proportional-derivative(PD) control laws. Assuming that the unknown disturbances mainly effect on the translational dynamics, an adaptive control term is investigated to compensate the effects of the disturbances. The position tracking control force implies a coupled-attitude system that connects the inner attitude loop with the outer position loop. An intrinsic PD control law, which is directly designed on the special orthogonal group SO(3), is proposed to track the desired attitude. In order to reduce the calculational difficulty of the attitude tracking control law, an observer-based control law is further developed while the control law and observer can be designed separately. Simulation results complete this work.